Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Room 6. Adrian’s Last Dream

They—who had wandered the entire summer in a wasted, deserted land, among the villages burned by the Poles, where only feral cats, remembering people, ran out to greet them—believed that air could hold echoes of voices that had once rung through it, and insisted that the wind often brought, mixed with the smell of the charred homes, the clamor of a great human mass—children crying, cattle bellowing, engines running—all those unmistakable sounds of a twenty-four-hour deportation, which in reality happened already two months ago.

Every time, Adrian patiently explained to them that it was not physically possible for a sound to exist without its source and even used a stick to draw on the ground the range of fading fluctuations. But, of late, he himself experienced such auditory hallucinations more and more often: his nerves were wearing thin, which was bad because ahead of him loomed the entire unbroken winter like a wall that could not be scaled—only dug under, crawled beneath by the patient marking off of days, one at a time, on the calendar in the bunker.

“I’ll craze!” he thought suddenly, in a flash—and got angry at the thought, jumping onto the trunk of a fallen spruce, slipping under it, hugging it with his arms and legs, delighting without shame in the joy of his body roused from immobility, each muscle awake (pure sport, a child’s game—he could’ve just as easily walked on top of the log, sweeping over his tracks with a handful of fir brush). His body responded, engaged, instantly recalling its long-forgotten skills, the deeply buried spider-like four-handedness of a mountaineer, which a long time ago, in a different life, had carried him over mountain gorges on Plast climbing trips; this was the same body, limber and lithe, and it was a blast of true delight to move it ahead like this, bear-fashion, under the log, trying not to disturb the feathery cap of wet snow on top. Instantly sweaty, warmed from inside with a healthy heat, dry as a fire’s, he crawled to the spot where he was to leap down into a quick, nonfreezing stream—the “warm-run”—pulled himself astraddle the log and drew a triumphant breath, looking over the whole wooded gulch, lit by the snow’s glow in the predawn dusk.

And that’s when it struck him, sharp as the proverbial stick in the eye, the thing they’d feared: the snow had betrayed them. The first, fleeting, phantom November snow—as soon as the wind changed and breathed warm from the south—didn’t hold, it sank and opened above their underground bunker, a thawed-out window of dark earth, clear like a circle of breath on cold glass.

Even from where he sat, he could see the rusting of last year’s leaves in it. Aw, for the love of tripe!

The wind “spilled” them, undid all their conspiracy. Even a child would know that under that patch of earth people lived and food cooked—on a tiny gas flame that smoldered for three hours to make a pot of gruel. Rot it. This bunker was never any good. He didn’t like it from the moment he saw it: not dug deep enough, shoddy (loose earth kept falling from the ceiling with a rustling noise, over and over, grating on their already ragged nerves) and fatally tight for the five of them. But at the moment they had no other choice but to stay and wait. And now he was walking away to the city, leaving his comrades to the mercy of fate—and the southern wind. By noon it should thaw more, speckle other open spaces with the same ice-hole blackness, and mask their hiding place anew—the air he drew in was humid, only the wind had to hold. Nothing to be done now—dawn was near. He had to go. Over the same wet snow.

He freed one hand from his overcoat’s sleeve and with a quick motion, like his mother used to do whenever he had to travel away from home at night, made the sign of the cross over the bank, which seemed to have held its breath in the predawn stillness, with the black stain against the white.

And plunged into the creek.

“De-vil’s winds! Accur-sed winds!” That’s how Geltsia recited the poem for them—she knew myriad poems by heart, while he had forgotten everything unnecessary that he had ever learned and could not stop marveling at her, making her recite again and again, so he could exist in the presence of her voice, whose sound in the darkness packed thick enough to cut with a knife the breath of four lice-ridden men (and she—She!—had to breathe their miasma), spilled like cascades of silk, seemed to glow like silver. And that’s Tychyna? Really? The same one who now writes odes to Stalin and the kolkhozes?

Ever since his Gymnasium years he loved no poet more than Ólzhych, his “To the Unknown Soldier”—that was about him: his life. But Ólzhych had been tortured to death in a German concentration camp by, they said, none other than Willie Wirzieng himself, whom Adrian was supposed to liquidate back in Lviv in ’43. Twice he tried, and both times something had stood in his way—that Gestapo man must’ve sold his soul to the Devil; the Huzuls say about such people that they have “help”...Adrian buried Ólzhych for himself then, together with the guilt about the failed missions; nothing in the world could make him recite one of his poems now. Even to Her. No, especially to Her.

De-vil’s winds. At least it’s safer to travel in this wind: his steps cannot be heard in the woods. Although it’s not just his steps that cannot be heard—those other ones, if they came, wouldn’t be heard either.

He once had the alias Beast—a long time ago, back with the Germans. Later, when Beast got on the GB wanted list, he had to change his alias, but, thank God, did not lose Beast’s sense of danger, which had kept him alive through the years in the underground and now whimpered inside him like a squashed pup: the wind carried the smell of a raid.

But after all, he thought, trying to reassure himself, wading in the free water of the warm-run (he would walk another two hundred yards, just to be sure, as far from the bunker as possible, so he wouldn’t betray its location with a stray footprint)—after all, this was no surprise: this raid covered the entire district and had been going on for more than a week already; it was the reason why they had to halt in the woods in this opportune makeshift bunker—still a ways from the village where they planned to winter.

The village turned out to be occupied by a Bolshevik garrison, which went searching house to house; several families, their courier informed them, had been taken right away in the middle of the night, and people lurked in their yards like shadows—at night, no one put any lights on, except in the village council building, the former parish house (the priest with his family having been shipped off to Siberia the previous winter), where the Reds sat in their meetings with the turncoats all night long and drained, for bravery, buckets of homemade booze they’d looted earlier in the day. The villagers quickly surmised that drink was the Soviets’ preferred currency, and there was hardly a home left that wasn’t at work brewing some; but it didn’t protect people from being robbed, because, in addition to the alcohol, the others, like locusts, swept up everything within their reach—in a widow’s home where an insurgent hideout had been prepared, they skewered the whole pantry with probes and when they didn’t, thank God, find the hideout, they took the single thing of value that was in the home—chrome leather for a pair of boots. They’re the horde, said the courier with unconcealed contempt; he was an older man who’d been with the partisans for a long time and knew very well that in any decent army, just as in the UIA, looting was punished by firing squad—but, he added, at least this time they weren’t setting homes on fire.

They no longer had need to torch villages as they did right after they came, when they treated the Western Lands as enemy territory—and sent whole villages to Siberia with only the clothes on their backs, murdered people on the spot without trials, raised them on bayonets, tied them to horses, sliced pregnant women’s stomachs, and raped girls in front of their mothers’ eyes. Now Stalin had called off those orders, now this was territory they considered theirs—and demanded obeisance and duty: seven metric centners of grain per each hectare of land, regardless of whether it was arable, four hundred liters of milk from each cow in a barn—just like the Germans before them, only the Germans didn’t trouble themselves by lying so shamelessly, never promised the Jews the happiest life in the world as they herded them into ghettos.

There was already a kolkhoz in the village: back in August, in the heat of the harvest, when everyone worked around the clock, the garrison rolled in without warning, toting a Ukrainian lobcock from the Eastern regions, who, waving his submachine gun, rounded up all the men into a fold, locked it, put soldiers around it, and said none who don’t sign up for the kolkhoz come out alive. They started coming out, with hands in the air, on the third day, when they had to drink their own urine.

And so the new Molotov Collective Farm was founded. The grain that had already been harvested was confiscated with the announcement that only those who work for the kolkhoz would receive some back, fifty grams for each so-called workday—pure scorn, people said, what this world’s come to, worse toil they’d never endured, even as serfs a hundred years ago with Austria, may it rest in peace! But bread was still taken away; those villagers, the poorer ones, who didn’t manage to hide theirs, now received assistance from the ward—out of the reserves meant for the insurgents. How long those reserves would last was something Adrian had to find out. In two days, one of his management adjutants was due with a report, and then he’d have the complete picture. Fortunately, back in the spring, when the hungry from Greater Ukraine and Bessarabia rolled into Galicia like thunderclouds, the Supreme Commander ordered the UIA to release part of the strategic reserves of grain they had won back earlier from the Germans, so they had enough to help the hungry and, according to the courier, last until the new harvest, so the people weren’t yet really affected by this kolkhoz.

The lobcock received an oral warning: the local Security Service detail picked him up for an hour-long conversation when he was traveling through the woods with his wife. There was some unpleasantness: the woman panicked at the sight of the banderas popping out from the bushes and fainted, and the husband later had to send her to spend a month in Lviv in the Kulparkiv clinic—to help her nerves. The man himself had cooled off since then, the conversation made its impression: he’d become decidedly nicer to people and even warned the warden about the current raid, but he still wasn’t trusted in the village—neither he nor his poor wife, who returned from Lviv, the courier said, all sort of beaten down, like a hunted rabbit.

Adrian was irked, as always, when he heard of innocent women being harmed—but in the same instant, he saw, as though sketched out in charcoal, Stodólya’s face, every muscle still; and it seemed he could almost hear the hidden ticking of the man’s thought, like that of a time bomb. Did that woman really see doctors in Lviv, or did she go through GB’s schooling? It was precisely the rabbits like her that often turned out to be the most dangerous informants—they were so terrorized by the GB that they lost their minds, became unpredictable. And Stodólya was an expert in that. This was his war; he fit into it perfectly. Adrian could only be grateful for his good fortune with Security. And he was very fortunate indeed. Wasn’t he?

It was a strange condition, dreamlike. For the seven months since he left the infirmary after being wounded, he’d been living as if dreaming with his eyes open (only in rare moments when he was, as now, alone, he could see all three of them at once, from outside—himself, Geltsia, and Stodólya, whom she called Mykhailo)—and marveled, impassively, as if in an ether-induced haze through which no thoughts could reach to the deep layers of living pain, half-consciously: How could this have happened, and why did it have to happen?. And in that dream he did, in fact, have many occasions to feel grateful for his Security Service, thrilled at every successful mission, of which, knock on wood, they’d had quite a few. It had been a busy summer, the summer of the Lord’s year nineteen forty-seven, when the movement faced the joint special forces of USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, a giant red octopus spread over three countries, and they didn’t waste this summer, nor did they mar their honor and oath.

He and Stodólya did work rather well together—like two mountaineers roped together, each one outdoing himself to prove his worth to the other. They fed each other a sort of constant reciprocal charge that kept them from giving in to fatigue, kept their minds sharp even after a sleepless march—like that time in the middle of summer, when they had a rendezvous and Adrian arrived not having slept for three days: he was shutting down as he walked, falling, for a few seconds at a time, into a dark well while his alert body continued to move on its own. Stodólya’s people were also exhausted, and Stodólya had eyes like those prisoners their boys had fought off down by the town of S.—bloody like meat in an open wound, with eyelids drawing pale circles on his blackened face when he blinked. It wasn’t Stodólya, but Adrian who noticed Stodólya’s guard sitting down to clean his weapon and said to the man—straining as if to shout from under a mass of water—make sure, friend, you don’t have a bullet in the stock. And it was good he said it, because it turned out he did. And Geltsia was there; he remembered the way she looked at him. Was happy then and not only because he prevented a grievous accident—there’d been a few already in their territory, two riflemen had died after getting wounded like that, cleaning their weapons when they’d lost their vigilance to fatigue—but also because he kept his, and She saw it. And Stodólya did, too. Lord, how he slept then—catching up on the whole summer.... And afterward, wolfing down hot grits, abuzz with new strength and energy that were flooding his body, Adrian told them how he and his unit mowed down a hundred Reds just a few days before—those crowding a clearing in a hollow like a herd of sheep brought to slaughter really—how they could barely keep their machine guns loaded, sweeping at them from the brush.... Even the usually tight-lipped Stodólya said he wished he could have been there.

No, they really fit themselves to each other quite well—you couldn’t have come up with a better personnel match if you tried; no great mind in General Staff could have devised this on purpose. Adrian wished sometimes there was an organizational adjutant he could pat on the shoulder, whoever it was that had brought them together like this, be it even the Devil himself. And more, somewhere at the bottom of this months-long, eyes-wide-open dream, he felt a pulsing vein, a warm-run of secret pride for not having yielded last spring to a moment of weakness, for having overcome himself—and not having asked to be transferred to a different territory for personal reasons.

Because it did occur to him at first. He could not conceive how he would work on the same territory with the other two. Friend Dzvinya, friend Stodólya—the thought made the hair on his head ache. Once he even tagged along with Woodsman’s people when they went to a village wedding—he’d never done that before, even when an insurgent family was celebrating a marriage and asked him to come—dragging himself out in public like a lout, hoping for a temporary distraction. But at the wedding the girls seemed to sing for his ears alone—like it happens with a fresh wound: no matter how you turn, you’ll manage to worry it, moan through your teeth—“Now eagles fly to drink from that well, now that girl stands under a wedding veil...”

In that instant he saw it clearly, as though through a brightly lit window at night: Geltsia weds Stodólya, and the one officiating is Father Yaroslav! He didn’t notice how he crushed a glass tankard in his hand—only saw it when the blood mixed with his uzvar drink and ran into his sleeve and people around him raised a fuss—“Hey, pity-pity, loved the girl since he was little, loved her since he was little, loved but didn’t take...” Two things stopped him then: first, that it would not have been easy to find anyone to replace him, especially at the moment, in May, when the place boiled like a hell-cauldron—no one starts redistributing troops in the middle of a battle!—and second, second was that Stodólya had saved his life. Carried him, wounded, from under fire, on his own back.

He had to love Stodólya like his own brother. That was the task he had set for himself—never mind that Stodólya, armed with silence like a dynamite cruiser (always, after he was gone, he left upon the others’ memories an impression of a much larger man), did not make it especially easy to love him.

Stodólya had saved his life.

And Stodólya was the man She loved.

Geltsia.

Friend Dzvinya.

(She protested, knotting her little brows, while her eyes flashed from under her frown with irrepressible joy at seeing him again, because he was her joy: her youth, Lviv, the first tango at a People’s Prosvita Hall ball, “I have time, I will wait, should you find a better one”—well, she did, didn’t she? For the first few moments, the play of light and shadow on her face, like on the surface of a mountain lake on a breezy day, blinded and deafened him; he drank her with his eyes like precious, thirst-quenching water, and did not comprehend what she was saying: “I’m a friend to you like all other men!”—and then she lowered her voice to a whisper which broke, with a small ding, a secret string, invisible and taut inside him: “Or we could address each other by name...Adrian?”)

Can dreams possibly be this clear? So you understand everything, so precisely—as if you’re watching a film with voiceover?

This is not a dream.

What is it then? Who is this man?

I don’t know. He is dead.

How could he possibly be dead? Don’t you hear how alive he is? Only, something is tormenting him. Something too big for one person.

Could this be why he cannot die?

“Mourn you have, my fair sir,” a Gypsy woman clucked at him at the fair in S., latching on to the sleeve of his gimnastiorka and pushing her face up close to look him in the eye. “Moi, such fair officer sir, and such mourn has you!” her low voice rang hypnotic, from deep in her chest, but to him it seemed to mock. “For your mourn, I’ll read for naught, just so you know what to watch for”—something about her reminded him of Rachel, the memory rose in his body and screamed in such a yearning spasm of desire that he bolted from under those eyes of hers that were pointed at him like two black craters framed by their blazing whites, tore away roughly, like a real Soviet captain—and barked over his shoulder, in Russian, “No need!” He wanted no witchery; he never wanted to see into the future, especially right before a mission, and that day in S. they managed their mission gloriously, broke apart a whole caravan in their Soviet uniforms—“Documents check!”—sending the trucks that carried weapons on a detour to an ambush, and then another unit neatly potted the general’s black GAZ-M20 that zigzagged among the trucks loaded with people and goods leaving the fair. The Bolsheviks already knew that the banderas did not attack where there were civilians and hoped to slip by in this manner, only they didn’t know we had people among the peasants riding those trucks, so they heard the “Down!” command precisely an instant before the machine guns opened fire from the forest, and no one outside the GAZ-M20 was hurt. Inside it, the driver and the emissary general from Kyiv were killed, but the one the boys were after, a major from the regional GB they wanted to interrogate, was lifted from his hiding place under the backseat, where he lay curled up like a babe out of cradle, alive and unharmed, and, over the course of the summer, this major gave Stodólya, man by man, the GB agent network across the entire region.

On several occasions during that time, Adrian found himself in a state of a strange arrested amazement toward Stodólya: he watched the man hunt down the octopus fanatically, pin it in, methodically, from all sides, setting his traps so tight a mouse couldn’t slip through, and then with one or two sudden strikes, sever the writhing tentacles with an expert surgeon’s precision. He witnessed more than the mere thrill of the hunt, as in combat such calculated, multistep operations obviously gave Stodólya his own, special satisfaction; and when, after each success his peculiarly molded face, dark as though burned from inside, with its close-set eyes and the protruding, slightly hooked nose (wolfhound, flashed through Adrian’s mind again: once he gets a hold of someone, not a hair will fall without his permission!) would assume for a short time a contentedly sated expression, lit with a quick, cunning squint—rebel, blast him!—and Adrian, however much he thrilled with their victory, felt somewhere deep in his heart discomforted as one feels in the presence of a rival who has an advantage. And this vexed him, and spoiled the joy.

On one such occasion, Stodólya loosened up so much that he allowed them all to be photographed—this was unusual indeed because Stodólya was religious about secrecy and fastidiously controlled circumstances in which any of the rebels might accidentally be caught on camera—and now it was he himself who permitted the courier to bring a photographer to the forest, from three villages over. The photographer, however, was reliable, checked many times and thoroughly instructed about where and how he was to hide the negatives; he took a picture of all five of them—Adrian, Stodólya, Geltsia, and the two Security Service guards, Raven and Levko (the young man with rosy cheeks whom Adrian warned about cleaning his weapon).

Right before that, Stodólya’s unit eliminated one of GB’s provocation groups that had been operating on their territory since winter, terrorizing civilians, and Stodólya, usually gloomy and short-spoken, uptight and buttoned-up, was openly celebrating, letting the success soften and thaw him. He told Adrian how long he’d been hunting those bandits—he found two traitors in that GB group, guys who’d been born around here. A year earlier, GB had taken them alive and recruited them in jail, so during raids they spoke like locals and the horrified peasants believed that it was really “our boys” who went on a rampage, and wished they could now hide underground themselves, not knowing what was going on and where they could turn for protection. But as luck would have it, the bandits made a mistake: got, as was their custom, drunk, and when killing a teacher’s family one night, dressed in the rebel-style mazepynka caps and embroidered shirts, failed to notice they hadn’t finished off a twelve-year-old boy, left a witness.

At this news, Stodólya’s eyes flashed with that predatory, quick flash of wicked triumph, instantly hidden by his characteristic squint, giving Adrian the feeling of a creeping, unpleasant chill that told him they were different: Stodólya spared no thoughts for the murdered family, and the wounded boy, in his mind, had played his part once he relayed the information and gave them the lead. Stodólya enjoyed the revenge itself, knew how to enjoy it. And not the way one enjoys winning a complex combination in chess, but almost lustfully, like love. Adrian did not know how to do that. The hatred toward the enemy, by itself, did nothing for him; he didn’t know how to savor it.

That was the first time it occurred to Adrian that Stodólya outdid him in something important. Or maybe that’s what a real counterintelligence officer was supposed to be—immune to sentiment. When a village courier, a very young girl, sitting with them around a campfire, blurted out, like a little kid, that she dreamed of studying to be a doctor one day, “when we have Ukraine,” she touched a nerve in all of them: Raven remembered how, in Polish times, he dreamt of becoming a barrister, defending the wronged; and the rosy-cheeked Levko, when he was little, acted in theatrical performances at Prosvita and everyone said that he would make a fine actor, but what kind of job is that for a lad? Adrian tossed in his two cents with a story about how he surprised himself when he discovered he could use trigonometry in battle after having been best in his class at it in school. Only Stodólya said nothing. As if he had no life other than the one he had now, none in reserve and none he wished for.

Another time they started talking about the assassination of Colonel Konovalets in ’38, and how differently, had he been alive, the Ukrainian card would’ve been played between Hitler and the Allies during the war, with an incomparably more winsome outcome for us. Stodólya regarded such high-minded speculations with open scorn, saying that such politicking nowadays was no more use than mustard after dinner, and, of course, he had a point; but the assassination itself, its technique and execution—with the bomb camouflaged as a box of chocolates—aroused his genuine curiosity.

“Colonel let his chocolate get him,” he grumbled, curtly, not as a reprove to the departed for having been fond of such high-society luxuries, as one might have expected to come from a peasant’s son (although Adrian never did know for certain whether Stodólya really was a peasant’s son, had no concept of what education he might have had—Stodólya never said anything revealing and kept his true identity a secret), but more with disappointment that even a great man such as Colonel Konovalets could have had a weakness, even one so tiny—hardly worth a haw—and one could hear in his voice the lesson he extracted from it and learned like Paternoster: that you dare not have any weaknesses the enemy could exploit. That’s who Stodólya was—a man without weaknesses. And that’s why he was disliked in the underground.

And feared a bit, too: Adrian wasn’t the only one Stodólya kept on edge.

From the day they had themselves photographed, when they celebrated eliminating that provocation group (every tentacle severed like that gave them, for a while, an illusion of breathing more freely), another conversation stuck in his mind, one that fell like a spark on straw and, word after word, flamed up into an almost serious quarrel between Stodólya and Geltsia. They were talking about the hungry that were coming from the East—for some reason, the locals called such people “the Americans.” Levko, of the rosy cheeks, had gone to the city to reconnoiter, dressed in woman’s garb (“You should see what a fetching wench he makes!” Geltsia laughed), and had seen, at the station, a freight train full of these people: they climbed down from the cars and fell right on the spot to rest, having no strength to drag themselves any further. Close by stood a canvas-covered army truck, and soldiers picked up and tossed into it, like logs, those who could not get up again.

Adrian remembered Gypsy from Slobozhanshchyna, one of the men with whom he had made acquaintance in the infirmary: he, too, had told of similar things happening in ’33 in Great Ukraine. When kolkhozes come, the Easterners then said to the Galicians, you’ll see it with your own eyes. Geltsia, agitated, told a story of her own: one spring she had to wait out raids in a different territory, stayed at a homestead with a reliable family, with the cover story of being their niece, when one day a very young girl, from somewhere around Poltava, wandered into their yard asking for work. “You mean that’s what she’d told you,” Stodólya interrupted, seemingly beside the point; it was obvious they had argued about this before, and now he was taunting Geltsia on purpose by treating her like a child (in response she merely glared at him from under her knotted brow, a single affected glower that pulled Adrian’s insides into a knot).

“The girl was called Lyusya,” Geltsia continued.

What kind of name is that? Oh, it’s short for Lyudmyla...a fine name, thought Adrian—it warmed him with some long-forgotten radiance, this name that could belong to a little doll, Lyusya-Lolly-little dolly, white lacy frills below the hem of the dress, fragrant girlish hair plaited into thin braids, the glossy silk of it in his hand. (Long ago, when he had just started at the Gymnasium, a young girl in a sailor suit appeared in the gates of the building next door every morning, with hair plaited into two thin braids—and, giggling, hid behind the gate as soon as he approached, until one time she lingered, stepping forward bravely and informing him, with the composure of a grown woman, in Polish, “Mama washed my hair, would you like to feel it?”—and offered him her bowed head, smooth, acorn-glossy with a little groove in the middle, pale like a June bug’s maggot, which he could not keep from touching, ran his finger over it—and was scorched, for the first time, by the silky defenselessness of woman, little doll, lolly, who trusts herself to you as innocently as nature itself, like a chrysalis that knows nothing yet of how fragile it is, pulled from its underground nest.)

“I told her,” Geltsia continued, “we had no work at the moment and we didn’t keep hired hands, and when she heard it she suddenly went all aquiver like a sick chicken, it scared me—my owners were having a pest on their chickens right then...” and, catching Adrian’s look, interpreted it in her own way: “Please let it not surprise you, I have mastered all farm chores already; I even know how to muck horse stalls! Only I don’t have the knack for milking,” she added, honestly. “So I ask her—and she’s so famished, so wasted, all eyes—‘Miss, are you unwell?’ And she tells me that she’s tugged there all the way from Poltavshchyna, that they have terrible hunger there, already ate their dogs and cats, and at home she left her mom and little sister Olyunka who cannot get up anymore, born in ’39—turns out, and I didn’t know this, Stalin forbade women to have abortions before the war.”

“Sure,” the boys chimed in, “he had to re-sow what he’d mowed in ’33!”

“Ain’t got enough of his own stock to people Ukraine—but he needs someone to work!”

“And to war for him too—they don’t spare their people at all! Look at the herds they drive at us—like lambs to slaughter.”

“In the mountains, after they had two hundred of their own killed in a battle, they poured gas on them and burned the whole lot.”

“You’re kidding! Whatever for?”

“You know why—to hide their losses. So the number’d be smaller.”

“And how’s that supposed to work—two hundred living souls gone from the face of the earth and what—no one’d cry for them up there in Moscow-land?”

“Like the Bolsheviks care! For them, a man’s life or a chicken’s, ’tis all the same.”

“And when they first came in ’39, some buffleheads in our village were so happy—they made it out, you see, that when it said the Bolshevik Party was krasnaya raboche-krestyanskaya, it meant Christian and for that reason krasna, fine. Asked of those: Where are your chaplains?”

Someone laughed, spoons clicked faster against the canteens, and Geltsia remained quiet, her eyes fixed on a single invisible point, as though she was overcome, for a moment, by that ancient, viscous fatigue that makes one fall out of the conversation or forget about a bullet in the stock, and at once something exploded in Adrian’s head, lighting, like a flare, the dark vista. He remembered who it was that wore that sailor suit—it wasn’t that little Polish girl next door, no, it was a different, older girl: down the steep Krupyarska Street the hoop rolled, bouncing on the cobblestones and throwing off dazzling flashes of the late afternoon sun, and a shaggy red cur chased, barking, after it, and up flew the kicked-up pleats of the sailor-suit skirt—“Lina!” Geltsia called and, turning to him, said with loving pride, “That’s my little sister.” He did not remember the younger girl’s face. After looking at Geltsia, it remained on his retina as a bouncing flare, like after looking at the sun—he only remembered how when she ran up to them, breathing hard, the tiny hillocks of her breasts rose under the sailor blouse and that fresh, apple-crisp waft of a young body that he always associated with Geltsia and the Dovgans’ home—the scent that is only found in homes with growing daughters.

He understood: Lyusya from Poltava and the little sister, Olyunka, she’d left at home reminded Geltsia of her own little sister—where was she now, the younger Dovganivna, for whom (now he remembered this, too!) he used to buy éclairs in the Mikolyash Passage, not yet bombed into dust then, in the center of Lviv—what had this blood storm done to her?

Since the spring of ’44, when the NKVD ordered the families of insurgents arrested en masse, small children included, every one of them carried inside the same burning wound, the knowledge that it was not just their own lives alone they offered to lay down—as the Gospels say, for their people, because that’s what they’d chosen freely, and their yoke was their freedom, and their burden was light—but that they also condemned, inadvertently, their loved ones to following them into suffering, into torture or Siberia, or at best—if they fell in battle—to the sight of their mangled, vandalized bodies—stripped naked, girls’ breasts or men’s genitals cut off, a trident carved into the dead forehead—and mothers and fathers unable to mourn their children or to bury them but bound to say, as they turn themselves into stone, not thrice but thirty-three times, like Peter, if he could bear it: I do not know this man. I do not know this woman. Mama, forgive me.... (And they forgave—they all forgave, only not all of them endured: the mother from Kremenets, when they stood her up before the bodies of her six sons, also said, “I do not know them”—but never spoke another word until her heart broke under the burden of six-fold grief, and the mother fell dead next to her children.)

It was easier for him: His mother and father were in Siberia already, and his mother never saw his brothers—arrested in ’41—dead. In the pile of massacred bodies the Bolsheviks left when they retreated, the family could not find either Henyk or Myros. One could choose to think they survived (and that’s what Mother believed), that they were safe somewhere, abroad, on the other side of the ocean.

He understood—and smiled at Geltsia from across all the past years at once, the way he smiled at her on that long-ago day when he stood at sunset on Krupyarska awash in the apple-crisp aura, the fresh air of young girlhood.

“And then—did you help those Poltava girls?”

Their eyes met—and such a depth of gratitude was in her gaze that he felt his entire chest flush with heat: she needed him, after all!

The men grew quiet and she spoke again, and he saw it all as though with his own eyes—he saw the girl Lyusya. He knew that type of Poltava girl, beautiful (Geltsia said the girl was beautiful) with the beauty of antique statues—tall, majestic as Roman matrons, with classical sloping shoulders and profiles destined for Carrara marble. He’d glimpsed their breed in the refugee waves more than once: The steppe-borne daughters of Ceres, Amazons, Kozak women—how dare the demons of the twentieth century turn them into highway beggars? Geltsia (bundled in a kerchief up to her eyes: “If any strangers came to the house, my story was I had toothache”) had fixed a bowl of thin gruel for the girl, fearing that fresh bread with milk might hurt her after she hadn’t had any for so long, and then took her to the pantry and filled a sixty-pound sack (“Took both of us to stamp it down!”) with wheat flower—of the stores reserved for the insurgents (“I wrote out a quittance for the warden, a very nice man, he just said, ‘We don’t keep count of that,’ said he’d have given her of his own grain, and flagged a wagon right there, to take her to the station, to get on the Zdolbuniv train”). And it was there, in the pantry that it happened: As they went to pour the grain into the sack, Lyusya from Poltava suddenly froze, her face changed.

“She was looking at my hands,” Geltsia said, guiltily raising her delicate, so unmistakably intelligentsia-bred fingers, and Adrian felt his stomach knot again in pity at the sight of them: they were fit for a typewriter or a radio, but to muck stalls?

“She knew you?” Levko whistled.

“Told you so!” Stodólya cut in, with a kind of venomous satisfaction. “Hands and lingerie—how many girls already got caught on that!”

“I took off my underthings when I changed, and I was going to soak my hands in brine-water and rub them with ashes—it makes them look like you’d farmed all your life, never fails. But, it’s a chore—so I hadn’t had the time! So we are standing there, the two of us, looking at each other: I know that you know that I know...and then she started crying.” Geltsia’s voice gave a suspicious din, like cracked crystal. “Fell to her knees, grasped my hands, kissed them. I yell ‘Get up, miss!’ and she, ‘I won’t tell anyone! I won’t tell a word to anyone, I swear to you!’”

She stopped, fighting the emotions. The men were silent, too.

“And that’s when she told me that as soon as they got off the train the MGB picked them up, right there at the station.... Kept them for half the day telling them horrors about the banderas and instructing them, when they go to the villages, to watch and report if they notice anything special.... Fed them pea soup for that.”

“And if they’d given her sixty pounds of flour, would you’ve vouched she wouldn’t tell on you?” Stodólya asked dryly.

This was no longer a man teasing a woman he loved; this was a superior analyzing the situation for the benefit of the younger riflemen, and Adrian, who had no grounds on which to intrude upon Security’s business, could only listen as any other accidental witness and concede, in his heart of hearts, that Stodólya had a point: Geltsia behaved in that situation dangerously indeed, she could have gotten caught herself and implicated her hosts. (Someday, when we win our Ukraine, we’ll build a monument, somewhere in the Carpathians so it’ll be seen from far away—a monument to the rural families that helped us, and went into Siberian exile for us, and died by the hundreds of thousands, but never once, not at one door said to us: go on, boys, God keep you, go on your way because we have children and want to live. No, instead they said: it’s one God’s will for all, what he gives you, children, we’ll take ourselves. You’re laying your lives down and we won’t spare you a piece of bread?)

Still, despite all the rationalizing, he felt that Stodólya pursued not so much Geltsia’s old (before she was under his command?) mistakes but something else, something more important perhaps, something unsaid: quite simply Stodólya did not believe any of those strays, even if they vailed before him—just as he did not believe anyone he couldn’t check and verify.

That was the most important thing.

Whichever portions of the world were not subject to his control represented, for Stodólya, enemy territory where there was no room for sympathy. Adrian had met other men who lived by the same notion—there used to be more of them when the war first began.

This was Poland’s legacy, he thought: for twenty years Poland handled us as tools, with a condescending, speak-to-you-through-the-teeth certainty that the Rúsyns were not people but pigs, and honed and tempered us to respond, like a good ax, symmetrically, in kind. But Poland fell and was forever banished from these lands, and so did Hitler’s Reich that had come armed with the same blind scorn for us, the üntermensch, and now came Moscow that knew no people at all—they gave no more thought to blowing their own into ashes than strangers. Tens of armies and hundreds of tribes had stampeded through Ukraine (from the happy Italians, handsome lads and inept, take-it-all-just-leave-me-alone soldiers who would’ve gladly given us all their ammunition if we’d let them go home without a fight, to the motley swarms of narrow-eyed nomads that erupted from the depths of the Asian steppes—like a new European invasion of Genghis Khan’s hordes, except that, for some reason, so many of them wanted to join our side when taken prisoner, almost as many as from among the Red Army Ukrainians). And over the shattered borders, through the smoke of the pyres, we glimpsed the Great Ukraine, the dream of our fathers, and learned, on our first marches east, from it, crippled and tortured in ways we never imagined, what neither Poland nor Germany could teach us: that there is no free country without free people, and he who forces his will upon others imprisons himself.

And when our military force, like a swollen river, reached the floodmark and began to spill into vengeance, and fires swallowed the manors of Polish colonists in Volyn and Podolia, we found another force that dammed the rush that careened toward blind retribution: the pontiff of St. George’s Hill, and with him the stigmatic martyrs in the underground put up a halting hand holding a cross and begged our people not to stain their holy weapons with innocent blood in the face of the Lord; and the Supreme Command spoke to us through its Third Congress ordering us to be reborn for the struggle ahead—because our force is called to serve not vengeance but liberation, and he who wrongs the unarmed, imprisons himself.

And we were reborn; we recast ourselves in the furnace of battle; we tempered ourselves into steel, shedding the irresolute into the winds of the crisscrossed frontlines—the accidental avengers, the forcibly mobilized, all those who had grown weary and yearned for the plow more than the sword and who valued life above freedom; only death’s volunteers remained, the bridegrooms of death—a noble metal that rang clear as a bell. And when the Soviets came, hanging us publicly in the squares (and quit as soon as they realized who they were dealing with), every such execution fed our strength—our boys stepped up to the noose with their heads held proud and high, called out to the crowd with their last breath, “Glory to Ukraine!” and the human sea rumbled, swelling with the wrath of forced silence, and at night dozens more ran off into the woods to volunteer and win themselves a death like that—a death of free men. And we already knew: for every force that enslaves, there will be another, greater force—German for the Polish, Russian for the German. Only the force of liberation has no match: it is the one and the same and combats all tribes and peoples, however many there are on this earth.

Our new war is no longer fought by the doctrine of Von Clausewitz, whose books we studied in underground training—not for a bridge, or a railway station, or even this or that inhabited locality. And although we do maintain our ward administration in all Western Ukrainian lands, we can’t afford to keep paying for it with growing losses and deportations the enemy chooses when they can do nothing else to us, because in another ten years of this contest the Soviets may just win for themselves a Ukraine without Ukrainians, as the Poles had already done with our lands beyond the Curzon Line. We stand against Moloch who stops at nothing, but we are the ones who are called to account to the thirty million souls of the nation whose freedom we have vowed to win. We fight for nothing if not for people’s souls, every day and every minute, and in this war we have a singular right—to die. And the right to lose is not ours.

All this Adrian should have said to Stodólya—but didn’t. Didn’t know how to say it. Such conversations were ill suited to Stodólya—he was too certain of his own strength. He was stuffed full of it like a strongbox with dynamite. A rock of a man, that Stodólya, hard as a rock wall. Listening to him upbraid Geltsia—it was like he turned her into an inanimate object, a lecture prop, an SMG taken apart and cleaned for the benefit of rookies who’ve yet to see fire, and she sat there blushing all the way down into the collar of her gimnastiorka and didn’t dare breathe a word in her own defense (after all, Stodólya was her superior, and she was his secretary)—Adrian worried above all that she would burst into tears. (It was afterward, much later, that she confided to him that she had lost the ability to cry in the fall of ’45 when she lost her most intimate friend—the girl had a wound to her stomach and she, Geltsia, then still Zirka, sitting up with her waiting for medical assistance, let the exhaustion put her to sleep—and awoke when she brushed against her friend’s already cold body; she showed him photographs of that friend—a thin-faced, dark-haired girl, pensive as if in anticipation of the near end. The deceased sometimes have that expression not long before death—as though their flesh, already sentenced by fate, wears thin, becomes threadbare, and lets through the imminent otherworldliness. Geltsia looked at the photograph, too, along with him, and her eyes, although red from lack of sleep, were dry.)

He did find a chance to edge into Stodólya’s diatribe, break up his verbal offensive with a few apt lines, ease the tension in the room—he had the knack for it. The underground had given him much experience in getting along with people of all temperaments. He reminded all of them together, in the world’s calmest voice: we have the order of the Supreme Command—feed the hungry. And that’s it. Period. No use flogging a dead horse. They are our brothers and we are saving Ukraine’s next generation. And another thing: if we won’t give a hungry man a piece of bread, how are we different from the Bolsheviks who feed only the ones they choose, their handmaidens—some with pea soup and some with the caviar from officers’ rations? Stodólya’s face grew even darker at that, but he said nothing. And then the courier came with the photographer, and they went to arrange themselves for the picture—he on one side, Stodólya on the other, next to Geltsia.

A sort of effervescence came over everyone then, and they laughed and joked with the photographer. Geltsia did, too—as though there had been no unpleasantness whatsoever.

Maybe he just didn’t understand women? Maybe she actually liked Stodólya’s annihilating upbraiding, being dragged over the coals by a tank like that—maybe she liked it when he showed that he was in command of her? And when Stodólya reproached her for carelessness—was it his way of showing her that he cared?

He knew nothing about that. Had no experience with women. Where would he have gotten it?

At that wedding in P., when he crushed a glass goddard in his hand, something else happened that he preferred not to recall: the alarmed womenfolk rushed to stop his blood, all but falling over each other, and in the end he found himself somewhere dark on a bed of hay with a fiery-eyed young wife who had fussed over him most of all, rubbed against him with her breasts, as if by accident, winked and made eyes at him, and finally teased him into an angry muddled confusion—alright, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll let you have it, you’re all the same! In the dark, through the hay, the woman gave off an intoxicating smell of sweat, mixed with the scent of the fire from the hearth, and whimpered with pleasure under him like a little dog, thin and high, on a single note—ee-ee-eeh, ee-ee-eeh. Outside, in the distance, the chorus of girls’ glass voices pealed the same song, the same record stuck on a gramophone inside his head: “Hey, pity-pity, loved the girl since he was little, loved her fine since he was little, loved but didn’t take.... ” And then came the moment when he realized, with disappointed, unquenchable irritation, that it was not Geltsia that he’d been yearning for with his flesh all this time, it was Rachel. Rachel who had nursed him back to life and did so in such a manner that any common woman after her simply had to seem bland to him. He all but cursed out loud at the unyielding, unavoidable, unclean whirlpool that had trapped him and dragged him further and further away from his love, and he promised himself, right there, barely having unplastered himself from the generous, sultry woman, that this would be the end of his romancing, once and for all. He couldn’t be allowed to think about women, couldn’t be distracted by them, and certainly couldn’t entertain any dreams of personal happiness—not until the struggle was over.

Unless, he quickly tacked on, leaving himself room for maneuver, there was a miracle.

But none came.

Afterward, he asked to keep that photograph of the five of them for himself—the only photo he had of Her. He never had any others: back in their Lviv days, she did not gift him any. They weren’t engaged, after all—they were friends, comrades from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ Youth Network, and later, under the Germans, comrades in the underground, and that is who they remained. He never once kissed her—they hadn’t had the time together for that. Even in his dreams she vanished every time he drew close, in the agony of bliss, to her radiant face. The fact that this face was now Stodólya’s to kiss—that Stodólya could, with the same panzer-force as he talked, crush her entire delicate figure, made even smaller by the uniform, fragile like a chrysalis, with the mass of his thickset, tight-jointed body (he had to be heavy, not for nothing did he always leave the impression of being larger than he really was...), that he could bore into her with the lover’s careless cruelty, and everything that happened between a man and a woman in private could very well occur between them—all this had plainly failed to reach Adrian’s awareness, as though he had an impenetrable shutter closed on that part of his mind.

In the photograph he saw it—as clearly as if it were real. As if those two were making love right before his eyes. That photographer must have come from the mólfar, the witching tribe—pagan worship was still alive in the country around them, the girls here wore wormwood under their clothes as protection from pishogues, and fern flower still bloomed in the heart of the woods on St. John’s night, and Adrian’s bodyguard, Raven, believed it, too. Or maybe, the war was the reason—the war that had roused not only people, but spirits? On their march to Volyn, rumors of various marvels swirled around them: that at the Pochayiv monastery on the feast of Assumption, Our Lady cried living tears before the people, while in the cave below stirred the silver coffin of St. Job Zalizo, the confessor to Duke Constantine of Ostrog, and, in Ostrog itself, Constantine’s voice was heard above the ruins of his castle, as it had once been prophesied to awaken the spirit of our people down to the twelfth generation. And every night in the fields around the village of Berestechko roared the invisible battle from three hundred years ago—sabers rattled and clashed, horses neighed, and the wounded screamed so you could hear each man’s lonely call for help, and in the year of our Lord nineteen forty-two this, obviously, could not portend anything good. But at least then the church still endured and gave people comfort and help. Now, with the NKVD men running the churches and the batyushki they installed questioning peasants who came to confession about any guests “from the woods” who might visit at night, one had no one else left to believe but the mólfars.

That was a mólfar picture. He could find no other explanation. This was the way people’s faces appear when a spell was cast on water—to make everything hidden rise clear to the surface. A single glimpse at his own visage (it jumped out at him, the first from the whole group) made Adrian remember the Gypsy woman from the fair: so this is how she saw him! The witch didn’t lie, it was truth she spoke—he had sorrow. A beast of a sorrow; pox on it. In the picture it could not be hidden. Like the smell that wafts off a man on the day of his death—as when, say, seven men are in a bunker together or camp to wait out the day in the woods, and all of a sudden one of them starts to reek of earth: that’s a sure sign that he’ll fall before sundown. If he’d spotted among his men anyone with eyes such as he had in the photograph (didn’t even look into the lens, the wretch!—looked somewhere to the side as if listening to a distant choir of glass voices, hey, pity-pity!), he’d take that poor slob and send him posthaste somewhere quieter, up to the mountains, to rest. Or, better still—legalize him: men don’t war for long with eyes like that. He felt bad about this mishap before Raven—the boy, just like Stodólya’s Levko, came out really well, while Adrian’s face seemed covered by a shadow cast by nothing. He looked a lot swarthier than Stodólya on the other side of the group—only the whites of his eyes glowed. Like a Gypsy’s. Or had the witch in S. put this jinx on him, to teach him a lesson?

Generally, there was all manner of wrong with the light in that picture: it fell seemingly from nowhere, obeying no optical law. By itself, the light of the summer day that glimmered here and there in the background could not possibly create this effect. If he didn’t know better, he’d say they had the picture taken in a church, not in the woods, but in a nave, where sheaves of slanted glow come streaming down from above, from under the invisible dome, streaming—and refracting around Geltsia.

Geltsia in her oasis of light looked as though she was rising through the air to float above the rest of them—it wouldn’t have surprised him to see that she did not touch the ground with her boot-clad little feet—so fair and serene, and smiling such a mysterious smile, as if she knew she’d been put there to watch over the men, but this was not for them to know, and for that reason her life-giving—he wished to drink it with his eyes and never stop, for the rest of his days—beloved smile that he had never seen before, had not quite come out, was halted halfway, only touching ever so slightly her daintily tailored lips, but not quite changing her expression, and her precious—nothing was dearer in the world!—clear-eyed face appeared to be lit from inside, as if Geltsia herself were the source of the fantastic light brought forth by the mólfar’s Fotokor, and the sheaves of slanted glow streamed and shifted to her and from her at once, creating, the longer one looked, the effect of a living, pulsing shimmer.

And with this radiant shimmer, Geltsia sheltered, like Our Lady of Pochayiv with her cloak, the impenetrably dark shape of the man who stood next to her—and one could see they were selfsame. In between them there was no line that divides human bodies. Never mind that they stood not touching one another, but half a step apart, and Geltsia held her disciplined left hand on the grenade at her belt, jutting a resolute cautioning elbow in Stodólya’s direction, as if precisely to emphasize the official distance between them.

But there was no line.

They were one, just as it said in the Scripture: “Therefore shall a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

He saw it for the first time—it hit him like an electric shock and the shutter fell in his mind.

Why him? Rot it all to pieces, why him—what does he have that I don’t?

For an instant—for a single short instant, but yes, he did, although he wouldn’t confess it even to save his immortal soul—he hated Stodólya. Everything about him—at once: that grim face of his with its hooked nose that jutted forth like an ax, the Red Army cap pushed down almost over his eyes, and the way he stood there with one foot forward like he owned the place—the rascal, you couldn’t help but admire him: “at ease” as all of them, but still alert, watchful, as they all should be—like a loaded bundook full-cocked, like a wolf on hunt, ready at any moment to leap up and tear into a stranger’s throat—and Adrian felt hot with shame for his impulsive outburst. Dog your bones, brother, this guy carried you under fire on his own back! It was this man’s efforts that dismantled the enemy agents’ network in three districts; this man’s intelligence service worked like a Swiss watch and knew of the Bolsheviks’ plans five minutes before the Bolsheviks themselves did—so what if he could not, did not know how, to let go of his abundantly tight grip without need? Adrian could indulge all he wanted in his nostalgia for the old warfare, in which the enemy came bearing arms, but that warfare was, indeed, over, and the one that was left for them to fight was incomparably harder: the housewife who put GB-supplied poison into the bread meant for the insurgents, and that batyushka who interrogated his flock when they came to confession—they did not bear arms—they were the arms, weapons of war in the hands of the enemy who wished to stay invisible. So was it really any wonder that Stodólya, constantly dealing with the darkest sides of human nature, had learned to treat people as tools to be used to achieve his goals?

Including the woman he loved?

Because Stodólya did love Geltsia. Adrian saw how he followed her with his eyes, how his face changed when their eyes met. On her name day he presented her with cyanide in a sealed, lightproof blue vial—he didn’t have any himself, such a luxury rarely fell into their hands, wherever did he find it? A few people Adrian knew resorted to arsenic, but it was not reliable—the Soviets could always keep them alive with a simple stomach lavage. Except cyanide, nothing was reliable: the last bullet you kept for yourself could jam, a grenade could fail to explode. Adrian was happy to know that Geltsia had a vial of certain death, pure as lightning, sewn into her collar. He was grateful to Stodólya for that.

And still, looking at their group in the photograph—looking at them all from outside for the first time, as though he had been asleep before and just awoke—he clearly felt unease, like the ticking of a bomb.

TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...

The unease emanated from Stodólya. The trusty Stodólya, solid as a rock wall. The Stodólya to whom you could yield—or die.

It could not have been easy for her. It was his life she eased, his power that she softened with her light. How long could she bear this double burden—the underground’s and the husband’s?

He felt the same unease again when they were informed that Stodólya’s winter bunker fell. Fell in the middle of October, when it was already too late to build a new one. They were lucky they hadn’t yet stocked it with a winter’s worth of food and hadn’t transferred their typewriter there. There had to have been a traitor, the courier said; around the same time, in the same territory, a Security Service courier girl got turned in by her own boyfriend—the gump believed the GB when they promised they’d leave them in peace as soon as the girl parted with the underground. When the girl said nothing under interrogation, they nailed her tongue to a board—right before the boy’s eyes. He may have been the one who somehow found out about the bunker and spilled it, but there was no way to find out: he lost his mind.

Stodólya and Dzvinya were left without a bunker. Someone had to share quarters with them. Only no one was in a big rush to winter with Stodólya: four months in a bunker with him was no picnic.

And, with a sudden sickening feeling in his stomach that usually occurs when you are staring into the black eye of a gun barrel, Adrian realized—he would do it. He asked the courier to wait and wrote a ciphered dépêche to Stodólya. With his secretary and bodyguard—Adrian’s own bunker had just room enough for five.

***

“Geltsia! Lolly, oh...are you here?”

“What?”

“Listen. I was dreaming about that again.”

“Me too.”

“What?”

“What did I say?”

“All kinds of very intelligent things, only really loudly. You woke me up. You were talking in your sleep—but in full sentences, like you were reading notes.”

“And what did I say?”

“That the set of memories is finite.”

“Really?”

“I’ve no idea what it means, but you repeated it several times.”

“Wow. That’s something...anything else?”

“I couldn’t memorize everything, Aidy. Something along the lines of everything that happened to us already happened to someone else before. The set of memories in the world is finite. A girl that lets you smell her. Who is that?”

“Marynka. We played together behind the trashcans, and she let me see her pee. Let me run my finger along her groove, down there.”

“Little slut.”

“No, wait...I remember what it felt like to touch her—like silk. But why would she be speaking Polish?”

“You don’t speak Polish.”

“It was in my dream. Only it wasn’t my dream; it was his dream. That other man’s. The dead one.”

“Did the dream have a different girl in it?”

“The girl may have been different, yes, but the memory was the same. A finite set. Actually, that’s a thought! It’s great that you woke up and heard me—I wouldn’t have remembered this on my own.”

“It’s my new vocation—a night secretary. I’ll be turning on my dictaphone before we go to bed and keeping track of your dreams.”

“No, really, Lolly, what if it’s true? What if the set of humankind’s memories is really finite and everything that is happening to us now already happened to someone else before? Then, in principle, this is a set that can be measured—theoretically, at least, you could pack all the memories in the world into a dozen hard drives, you know? It’ll be the only reasonable explanation for all that déjà vu, no?—just a shred of someone else memory getting caught in your mind, like a speck of dirt in your eye...a couple hundred kilobytes, that’s all...”

“Sweetie, you’ve gotten me all messed up with your kilobytes. Now I can’t remember anything I dreamt myself.”

“Neither can I—it’s all bits and pieces...but a finite set—that’s a great idea, Lolly! I’ve been thinking about it, just couldn’t find the answer—and it’s right here: if different people’s memories match, not because of the experiences they share, but by the random-numbers principle, like, you know, cards from the same deck, when sometimes you draw four sixes in a row—that’s a different picture.... ”

“The photograph!”

“What? Why?”

“You said picture and I remembered: there was a photograph. In my dream. The same one, of Gela in the woods.”

“No kidding?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure...a picture of a woman taken not long before she died. Vlada, when we shot that interview with her, in the Passage, for a moment had eyes like that—as if no longer hers. And I also, for some reason, remembered Aunt Lyusya, my mom’s sister—you haven’t met her, she died in 2000...”

“Of what?”

“Breast cancer. She had this tremendous will to live, believed to her last day that she would get better. Mom was with her, and she said when her heart stopped, she had this baffled expression on her face, like—what, this is it? She looked like that in the coffin, too.... She was a very strong woman, one of those, you know, that hold the family together—way out of Mom’s league in that respect. After the war, during the famine, she went after bread somewhere to your neck of the woods, schlepped a sack of flour all the way back from Zdolbuniv, no one knew where she got it.... That flour fed them through that hungry year—and Mom was so weak with hunger she couldn’t get up. Later, when Mom left to study, Aunt ferried food to her in Kyiv too, every Sunday.... But what made me think of that?”

“Must be that kind of a night. With the dead in our dreams. Means it’ll rain, no?”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s not supposed to be. Here, be quiet a sec. Can you hear that?”

“What?”

“The wind.”

“No, be quiet now. You’ll hear it howl. Come to me. Here...Lolly, my Lolly...my apple-crisp girl...”

***

A bird cawed once, waking. Another one clapped its wings against the wind from atop a spruce and answered with a sad cry. (He would say—couriers calling out to each other.)

He had to leave the forest while it was still dark. He had to walk through the city in broad daylight in his officer’s overcoat with ripped-off stripes like the ones commonly worn by discharged Red Army soldiers—who were clean-shaven and even sprayed with the tear-inducing acidic chypre (all Soviet military men seemed to take baths in the stuff; what is wrong with those people?)—all in order to meet, practically in the enemy’s own lair, in an old apartment building already half occupied by the new “owners,” a dying man who had no right to die until he told him what he knew.

His father used to go out like this in the dark too, in rain and snow—to administer the sacraments to the dying. Little Adrian would wake to the creak of the plank floors and the shuffle of steps behind the wall, and would see a golden stripe of light creeping under the nursery door. Something groaned in the big stove and the wind wailed in the chimney; younger, sounder-sleeping Myros and Henyk puffed together, like a pair of hedgehogs, in the dark under the down blankets. Outside, black furry forms shifted behind the windows—the men set out because someone needed them. And a sweet, minty chill squeezed the boy’s chest from inside because he knew that one day he would become one of those men and would also set out somewhere in the middle of the night, because such was the duty of men.

And now he had to set out, had to reach the dying man while he was still alive. Had to take from him information that determined the course of hundreds of other people’s lives. Was this, then, not a sacrament?

“See you later,” he said when he left; that’s how they always parted in the underground. See you later—never Farewell!

“God help you,” breathed the watchful darkness in response, in four distinct voices, the way his mother used to bless his father with the sign of the cross when he set out, and later blessed all her sons, one after the other: God help you! Geltsia and the boys—they were his family now; he had no other. His entire past was with him now, from the earliest years of childhood—the entire length of his life wound onto the bobbin of his sleepless, tense, twenty-seven-year-old body.

He carried it all. Had to carry it all the way there and back, intact and unharmed. Knew too much to fall. And would know even more on the way back.

The other man, the one fighting death at this very hour, also knew he didn’t dare succumb until he passed on his secrets. Adrian was on his way to relieve him of the burden of his earthly duties—to release him unto death.

Was this not a sacrament?

He didn’t know who the man was, was afraid even to think of that (it had to be someone he knew, someone from the regional command)—only knew the password to enter: “Do you have Brits to sell?” And the answer: “Yes, but only size 10.”

Brits—English chrome boots, not more comfortable but decidedly better looking than the American military boots and, for that reason, especially loved by the small-time thugs who’d flocked “in Western” Ukraine from all over the Soviet Union to grab whatever the comrades hadn’t already stolen—would actually come in handy: his own boots, a German trophy, were worn out. They had served him well though—not once did he trip or stumble on forest paths.

The forest grew thinner, sensing its edge. In the hum and groan of the wind, Adrian’s sharp-tuned hearing distinguished the drip and slide of melting snowcaps from the tree branches: it was getting warmer. Snow no longer cracked like gunshots underfoot; with every step, he found more cushion from last year’s leaves, moss, and mulch under a thin dusting of white. New snow, especially when wet, is the most dangerous—not like dry powder. Worse yet—old snow caught under a crust. But this—even if he left an accidental footprint in the dark somewhere—would soon hollow out, collapse, wash away. By light, they won’t find anything. Unless, maybe, they bring dogs. But then again, they train their dogs to the smells of a rural home—and he stinks like they do, of chypre. Reeks to high heaven—exactly like all dog bosses with red stars on their caps.

So why did he feel so weary-hearted, why?

He had dreamed something bad, that’s why. And he could not remember what it was.

Couldn’t even put shards of that dream together. Of one thing he was sure, though: the dream boded ill. And this feeling—that in the dream he was entrusted with a terrible secret that touched on the fate of many people, and he lost it, like a nervous rookie on his first courier run—would not let go of him. The beast that lived inside him lost its bearing and pawed at him, restless, not certain where the danger was coming from—from the raids in the forest behind? From the city ahead? And was it he himself that was in danger, or the friends he left in the ill-fitting makeshift bunker?

In Von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege, he once underlined something that struck him as especially apt: four elements constitute the atmosphere of war—danger, tension, chance, uncertainty. This was the formula he always chose to begin the course he taught at junior officers’ schooling: when you have a ready formula it becomes incomparably easier to act. Was he not well used to uncertainty? To the feeling of danger that filled the air? What, in heaven’s name, was happening to him—all he had done was forget a dream!

And yet he felt disarmed.

He stood at the edge of the forest—awash in the inky-blue clearness that quickly, too quickly, with the swiftness implacable to any human prayer or curse, thinned the November night (somehow, all his riskiest missions, just like all the most significant collisions of his life, always happened in November)—and felt a nasty, uncontrollable tremor rise from the depths of his sleep-deprived body and swell in his throat, unstoppable like vomit. He tore off one mitten, fanned his fingers in front of his face—but it wasn’t light enough yet to see if his hand was shaking. Dog your mother! Had he gotten so he was afraid to step out of the woods?

Stodólya. Stodólya was the reason—Stodólya wrung his memory dry of dreams. From the instant he woke, the man weighed down his consciousness with the full mass of his presence (oh yes, he was constantly aware of Stodólya’s presence as of an external force!) and stole that portion of Adrian’s attention that was supposed to keep his dreams afloat. Stodólya was heavy; he left no room, not the tiniest crack for anything that was not him. He was stronger than Adrian, yes, that was the thing. Finally, he’d said it to himself. Stronger than himself, Adrian Ortynsky (aka Beast, aka Askold, aka Kyi), Ukrainian Insurgent Army Lieutenant, the region’s administrative adjutant, decorated with the Bronze Cross of Service and the Silver Star.... None of which meant anything against this simple fact: Stodólya was stronger.

And Geltsia knew it.

That’s why she’d chosen—him.

A woman, of course, she was a woman in everything—how do they say it in French?—a woman par excellence. And you can’t fool a woman; a woman sees the strongest man way before his commanders—and more surely than the men he commands. Stodólya had will enough to bend, not dozens, but hundreds, even thousands of people. The sector was too small for him—he’d do well with the region. Or even in the area’s Central Security Service Command. One day, if he doesn’t get killed, that’s where he’ll go, most likely. While he, Adrian Ortynsky (Beast, Askold, Kyi), always felt best in open combat—and when it ended without losses. Hated nothing more than sending people to their deaths. And that’s why, however much longer he had allotted to him, he would never rise to regional command.

For some reason, he remembered the story Levko told him the day before—a story that was more like a confession. Levko did have an artistic temperament, and Adrian liked him: the boy was sensitive. Of them all, Levko was the first to feel uneasy—as soon as they stepped into that bunker to wait out the raid. He joked and bantered but it all came out somehow nervous, and Adrian could feel it: he and Levko, whom he had once prompted just in time to check for the bullet in the stock before cleaning his rifle, were connected by that special, wordless link that occurs between the rescuer and the rescued—the one Adrian could never sense with Stodólya. When they found themselves alone, Levko started talking as though he’d been waiting for the opportunity for a long time. He told Adrian how they had to liquidate an MGB major they’d captured during the operation in S., one they’d lived with in the woods for six months, until he gave them every single agent he knew in the territory. That major was great help—he cooperated willingly—and in the six months they spent together they all got so used to each other that near the end they didn’t even guard him anymore. Where would he escape to anyway, back to his Bolsheviks? To be court-martialed and shot?

When Stodólya gathered his Security Service troops and announced that the operation was completed and they no longer needed the major, it became so quiet you could hear a pin drop. They knew more about the major than about each other. They knew he was a Ukrainian, from around Zaporizhya, that he’d been mobilized to NKVD when he was very young, that he’d brought his wife and child to Lviv with him, that he had an elderly mother back in Zaporizhya to whom he sent money every month—they knew lots of things. Stodólya asked if any one of them would vouch with his life that the major could be left with the underground. That if they kept him, he would pledge allegiance to Ukraine and would fight on our side. None of them were ready to do this; the silence held. Stodólya asked if anyone would volunteer for the liquidation. No one did. Stodólya then chose two men, who later came back as good as dead themselves.

The major told them that he hadn’t expected any other end for himself. That he was a military man, too, and understood. Even though he wasn’t a military man—he was from the NKVD, which meant he, too, must have had to shoot at an unarmed man with a blindfold over his face. Service like that makes men into no-good soldiers: they can’t fathom that the gun barrel can just as easily be turned on them, and when they first chance upon such an impossibility, they lose all human semblance on the spot; it’s hard to watch. But in the six months he had spent with them, the major also changed, had been reborn—and faced his death as an officer should, as if he wished for nothing more than to earn their respect, to be seen as their equal. He said under no circumstances were they to send word to his wife, because it would only put her in danger from the bureau. It was better for her to know nothing and receive his pension with a bonus for death in service. He asked them not to blindfold him. And for a smoke. They smoked, all three of them. Get on with it, boys, the major said.

That wasn’t a liquidation; that was murder. Everyone knew it. Those two boys fell soon afterward—first one and then the other volunteered for “dead missions,” the kind from which no one comes back. They were looking for death, Levko said. What they had done broke something inside them. Levko said this without judgment, as if he were speaking about a random bullet or a change of weather—in no way did he intend to discuss with Adrian his commanding officer’s actions, which he did not doubt; something else tormented him, and Adrian saw what it was: Levko blamed himself—for not having vouched for the major at that decisive moment. For not having had the courage to step forward, click his heels, look Stodólya in the eye and say, “I vouch for him.” And to hell with what comes next.

He was a good man, Levko—and it pained him that he had not had the courage. That it was his, Levko’s, faintheartedness, and his faintheartedness alone, that cost these people their lives. All three of them.

“You are not a coward,” Adrian told him. “But it is good that you’re afraid of being one. A man is always afraid of something; only fools have no fear. The question is what are you afraid of more? Then your greatest fear snuffs out the lesser ones—and that is true courage.”

This was an idea Adrian cherished; he’d had it since long ago, since the Germans, when he first took part in an attack on a Gestapo jail: the idea that courage, true courage in which you never falter, is simply a question of the hierarchy of fears—when you fear dishonor and a traitor’s brand more than death (and more than that, most of all, so much your blood turns to ice in your veins, you fear Shevchenko’s poetic warning: “You’ll perish, vanish, our Ukraine and no trace will be left on earth”—nothing more horrible could befall you than bearing witness to that, and no force in the world could ever stop you from fighting to avert that horror). But he couldn’t be certain Levko understood the word hierarchy. Although, really, he was saying it all just to say something. Not to be silent. Talking to shut up his own conscience. Because, had he been in Stodólya’s shoes, wouldn’t he, Kyi, have given the same order?

It was like he comforted Levko in Stodólya’s stead. And Levko did cheer up a bit, brightened like a finch brought in from the cold (looking at him made Adrian think, for no particular reason, shame about your rosy cheeks, brother; winter’ll paint you green like potatoes in a cellar...). And it was only now, as he waited at the edge of the forest for the clouds that raced across the sky, swiftly unspooling into ribbons of smoke, to cover the moon and allow him to come out, that the conversation came back to him, like a bitter heartburn after a heavy supper, and he thought, coldly and clearly, yes, he would’ve given the same order but under his command Levko would have found the courage to step up. He would have clicked his heels and said, hand to the peak of the cap in salute, “Permission to speak, friend commander, I vouch for him.”

And to hell with what comes next.

Adrian was now finally awake, completely. Inside he felt empty, like before stepping into the line of fire. With a quick sharp whine, time came together, squeezed like a Moscow harmonica’s bellows—into the streaming minute, a singular chink open for immediate action. And that disgusting tremor inside faded, went still. And his hands weren’t shaking.

He was free.

Around him, his land breathed in the quiet of the night. The spirits of the woods who had watched over him guiding him through the thickets, stood behind him. This was his land—his strong-as-death love pulsed like invisible light in the dark. Those who had come to stomp it down with their boots had no such strength. Could do nothing to him.

He felt the angry glee enter him. The berserk heat that comes in battle and—if you have luck—on a mission, fills your body with dreamlike ease, with the tease and tickle of danger that arouses and intoxicates more irresistibly the more boldly you deny that danger, until it retreats, tamed, because you showed yourself to be stronger. Ahead he could see the white field—no, not white but already speckled, welcoming him with black wet inlets of thaw; his mind—a white knight in icy armor—observed from outside his body, watch in hand, and the watch ticked loudly, calculating the minutes measured before his turn, and somewhere in space, or perhaps inside himself, an invisible hand wound up a barrel organ for a bawdy kolomyjka tune, tighter, tighter, don’t crack the spring—no, that’s a twig cracking underfoot, like a girl who’s done waiting. “To the mountains go white sheep, up higher and higher, I slept with a partisan and I ain’t yet crying.... ” He grinned, noisily drawing in a full chest of sharp forest air, stretching his lungs like an accordion’s bellows in anticipation of a dance, cruel like a wolf hunt. Only it wasn’t him anymore—it was a demobilized Soviet Army captain, Anton Ivanovych Zlobin, dispatched, with magnificent documents and a Nagant revolver engraved with his name, by the grain supply department to finalize grain collection in the district. Alright, motherfucker, let’s go! said Anton Ivanovych. And crossed himself.

Let the games begin.